Wojciech Gerson was a leading Polish painter of the mid-19th century, and one of the foremost representatives of the Polish school of Realism during the foreign Partitions of Poland. He served as long-time professor of the School of Fine Arts in Warsaw, and taught future luminaries of Polish neo-romanticism including Józef Chełmoński, Leon Wyczółkowski, Władysław Podkowiński, Józef Pankiewicz and Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowiczowa among others. He also wrote art-reviews and published a book of anatomy for the artists. A large number of his paintings were stolen by Nazi Germany in World War II, and never recovered.

Young Poland was a modernist period in Polish visual arts, literature and music, covering roughly the years between 1890 and 1918. It was a result of strong aesthetic opposition to the earlier ideas of Positivism. Young Poland promoted trends of decadence, neo-romanticism, symbolism, impressionism and art nouveau.